At this past competition, my team and I noticed that one team received four awards. They received both the Excellence and Judges Award, as well as the Tournament and Robot Skills Champion. Don’t get me wrong, they are a very good team, and deserved an award. But in the Judging Guide, it specifically says that “no one team should receive more than one Judged award”. This happened at a past tournament with the Excellence and Sportsmanship.
What do you guys think? Should this be okay, or is it legal?
Judge Guide (end of page 6):
I’m sure this was an accidental oversight. The rules do say that no team should receive more than one judged award, but, please correct me if I’m wrong, the word should was used.
And, at some events, Sportsmanship is voted on by teams rather than solely by judges.
The judges shouldn’t give more than one judged award to the same team. It happened at a tournament that I was the EP at in December… Because I put it in the computer wrong… Yeah… When this happens it is usually just an oversight and mistake.
In fact, getting the Judge’s award typically means that is your judged award so the team would have “known” at that point that they weren’t getting excellence… Then it comes around!
As far as skills and Champion, that’s just who it’s going to be, and they can overlap with the judged awards.
There are extreme edge cases… If only one team turned in a notebook and it was a good one, they could win both design and excellence, with the appropriate disclaimer given. If the notebook was awful, the judges could determine that the award isn’t to be given. But these cases are extremely unlikely and not meant to be instructive. I’m trained as a mathematician and I like to cover the cases.
Given that the Judges Award and the Sportsmanship Award don’t qualify for anything and sometimes aren’t even awarded, I would not stress too much about this. I would be concerned if Excellence and Design went to the same team, though.
Correct, we had that happen at Regionals a few years ago getting both Excellence and Design, the RECF representative caught the error late, but my kids were good about bringing the design trophy to the team that should have gotten it.
We spread the wealth, even if it’s a “judges award that doesn’t mean anything”, because to a team that gets it, the award WILL mean something. 
Agree. I like it when the judges award is given to a team that it really means something to. I think that’s that point of the judges award.
I was curious as to what the total official wording was on this and found the following paragraph in the judges info:
While it does say “should win” in the middle, that seems like more of a clarification issue related to performance awards. The top section makes it pretty clear that they intend for no team to win more than one judged award.
Judges award is for special recognition and should, I hope, be valued by the teams receiving it. It indicates, typically, that they didn’t “fit under existing awards, but are nonetheless deserving of special recognition.”